Medical students navigate healthcare maze

For several years now, doctors and patients have been struggling to reimagine the future of health care. Policy makers, health care experts and pundits have been eager to help, churning out well-meaning op-eds and essays and cobbling together exhaustive blogs and books. In a mere 175 pages, and with an impressive roster of references and well-placed graphics, “The Health Care Handbook” illuminates the maddeningly opaque terms, acronyms, organizations, personages and policies that abound in health care. The authors do so not by expounding on the minutiae, but by jettisoning the jargon and gobbledygook and presenting only the core ideas.